9 ms·

Why GIMP is Inadequate

201 points by rkwz 16y ago

healthyhippo 16y ago
I don't know much about photo editing, but I've used Gimp for a little while along with Inkscape for editing. I use it for simple stuff- drop shadows, minor logo work, etc. Is there a noticeable difference vs. photoshop on that level?
- webuiarchitect 16y ago
  Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!! Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.
  - sgift 16y ago
    Are there any arguments why a non-commercial product (not necessarily Gimp) will never be able to reach "that level"? This looks suspiciously like "open source software is always worse than closed source!!!!!" which has been refuted more than once.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins. But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.
      - atesting 16y ago
        Have you ever tried MyPaint? IMO a good example of a software which does its tasks very well (I'm no (digital) painter, but I've heard about graphic artists seriously thinking about switching to it... if it only had a Mac version...).
  - tintin 16y ago
    I agree Photoshop sets the expectations high. But I don't agree that a non-commercial product cannot reach that level. Take a look at Blender.
    - jkahn 16y ago
      That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
      - anthonyb 16y ago
        But it's been open source for 8 years and under active development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development There can't be a huge amount of the original source left, surely?
  - jarek 16y ago
    Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".
- david2777 16y ago
  I think that for small stuff like that the difference won't be very noticeable,especially to the end user. If you get some designers to really look at it they might notice a difference, but I wouldn't want to pay for a Photoshop license for minor stuff like that.
  - derefr 16y ago
    A more interesting question is, to me: is The GIMP an adequate replacement for Photoshop Elements? I believe they have the same target market—people who are "adding drop shadows, doing minor logo work, etc."
    - dagw 16y ago
      Purely feature wise they might might be comparable, but features isn't where PSE's strength lies. Photoshop Elements has done a lot of UI work to make common tasks really easy. Someone who has never done any photo editing before can probably sit down with PSE and quickly get pretty great results without any major problems. The same can definitely not be said about The Gimp.
- furbearntrout 16y ago
  Not really. The nice folks at Adobe would have you believe otherwise, but at low color depths, low image sizes, low skill levels; the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate. Unless you are making a lot of images, _and_ relying on them to make money, gimp is more than enough.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    > the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate). I think Photoshop, like Windows, is a beneficiary of piracy in this respect: if there were no way to get Photoshop for less than $999, there would be a lot more people using alternatives for a lot of niches where Photoshop isn't absolutely necessary. But students, people starting out, small-time freelancers, and even some random home users editing their Christmas photos just pirate Photoshop. Although, Paint.NET is gaining some market share in the home-user category.
    - ZenzerNet 16y ago
      Photoshop Elements is reasonably priced at £58 on Amazon as of right now. The people you're talking about do not NEED the full $1000 package.
      - CrLf 16y ago
        They don't NEED it, but they WANT it.
    - true_religion 16y ago
      At my school students recieve Photoshop for free if they are in a class that requires it, and if not they can buy it at deeply reduced rates---about ~90-120 for CS4 if I last recall.
- tintin 16y ago
  In my opinion there is. In Photoshop you can attach dropshadows (layer styles) to layers. This will save you a lot of time when something changes. I used Photoshop and Gimp. I can create the same images in Gimp but it just takes a lot more time. For hobby that's ok, but for work it's not. Thats why people are willing to pay a lot for Photoshop. One thing that is bothering me in Gimp is that there is a layer size. Seems like a minor thing. But these are the little things that get in the way of working quick.
iwwr 16y ago
This is valuable feedback from an artist who actually bothered to try to use the software. Ultimately, for a highly-paid artist, learning a new interface is itself costly.
- iwwr 16y ago
  I don't quite understand the downvotes, anyone care to comment? I just meant that time is a valuable commodity which artists can rarely afford, unless they have a really good reason to. I applaud this reviewer for having the time.
  - kprobst 16y ago
    I don't think his main problem is with the interface.
joakin 16y ago
I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...
- damncabbage 16y ago
  I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)
  - masklinn 16y ago
    There are numerous closer targets to shoot for, which are not photoshop but are still pretty darn nice (Acorn or Pixelmator for instance on OSX). OSX also has SeaShore, which I believe is built upon GIMP's tech but with a Cocoa frontend. It is fairly nice.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Wondering how hard would it be to build it on top of GNUStep. Anyone cares to try it?
    - eli 16y ago
      I bought Pixelmator years ago and it's great for what it is, but it's not really in the same class as Photoshop (or really even GIMP). The UI is clean and functional, but even as an occasional user I run into missing features. Seashore looks interesting.
  - wisty 16y ago
    Usability is key for a lot of users. I don't care if my photo editor is good enough for a pro. Pros use Photoshop. A good, free, lightweight editor is what most people need for removing red-eye, putting daemon horns on their third grade teacher, and cropping out their ex. An open source editor will always be able to do high-end stuff, as long as it has some decent scripting capability. The rest of us just want something simple. Take Open Office. The reason I switched was the better equation editor, and the tab-complete. I like FireFox because of the tabs and extensions. There should be more focus on a minimal but usable product, and letting the extensions make up the feature gap.
billhasmail 16y ago
"Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the internal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL." http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html Clearly this artist was not a curious user.
- froydnj 16y ago
  I think you're illustrating the point of the author: such an option should be the default. The user shouldn't have to go looking for it.
- krakensden 16y ago
  GEGL is not fully baked yet, using it reduces stability and the operations you can perform. Reviewing the default, non-GEGL GIMP was the right decision.
samdk 16y ago
The 8-bit color limitation issue is well-known and has been for a long time. The solution is GEGL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL), which has been under development for a (very) long time now and is partially implemented in GIMP 2.6, the latest stable version. It is a problem, but it's important to put it into perspective: almost all monitors display 32-bit color (EDIT: or less) anyway, so if you're doing work targeted at a computer screen, it probably doesn't matter anyway. If you need to do work at color depths higher than 8 bits per pixel (that is, if you're doing serious print work) then yes, you need to be aware of these limitations. If you're almost everyone else it's probably not an issue. (I don't mean to imply that it's not a problem at all, but I think it's important to keep it in perspective.) For the people here asking whether GIMP is good enough for what you're doing: Ars Technica did an excellent review of GIMP 2.6 about a year ago (EDIT: 2 years, but it's still the same major version). It's long, but well-worth reading and will answer your questions. It's written from the perspective of a professional who uses Photoshop, but does an excellent job of remaining balanced. This quote summarizes the review (and also my opinion) pretty nicely, I think: I may seem to skew negative since I talk so much about what's missing, but it's hard to dwell on what a program does well and not sound like a fawning idiot. Most people who sit down to get image editing work done with GIMP will not be disappointed. There is a ton of room for advanced work here. It can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/01/gimp-2-6-review.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/01/gimp-2-6-... While I don't follow it closely enough to really discuss GIMP's current development status, development does seem to have slowed significantly (purely from a user's perspective) in recent years. This is a real shame, since I think that for the most part it's an excellent program and in general I much prefer to work in GIMP over Photoshop. For all of its many flaws, I think it's a fantastic piece of software.
- w1ntermute 16y ago
  > Ars Technica did an excellent review of GIMP 2.6 about a year ago. From the article, seems like it was 2 years ago: "Last updated January 13, 2009". Might seem like an insignificant detail, but 2 years is an eternity in OSS. Are you sure things haven't changed significantly since that review?
gsivil 16y ago
I would be curious to see similar posts for Octave and OpenOffice. I am really happy that they exist but "inadequate" would be a fair word to describe both. Comparing of course with Matlab and MS Office .
- eru 16y ago
  Yes, though you can also compare MS Office to something like TeX, and find that either option is inadequate, depending on where your focus lies.
- AlexandrB 16y ago
  I haven't used Octave, but I find that Python + PyLab is a great replacement for Matlab in many cases. It's certainly a subset of Matlab in terms of features, but the things it does do, it does really well.
njharman 16y ago
as far as gimps usefulness to profesionals the movie version fork cinepaint, is good enough for making Harry Potter and other movies I question authors knowledge of / authority to speak for artistic professionals.
- tzs 16y ago
  Uhm, Cinepaint is a point in favor of the author's conclusions about GIMP. One of the reasons for Cinepaint is to fix the color depth problem the author wrote about.
cookiecaper 16y ago
There are several good alternatives to GIMP depending on what you're doing. GIMP is probably the best for traditional photo editing, but there seems to be more programs oriented toward illustration. In particular, I like Krita. I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche generally isn't comprised of big fan of computers in the first place, so they are more like the Office crowd and just want to use what they're used to; they're hostile to any change from the start. I also think that the extremely long development cycle of GEGL, which was necessary for the most commonly requested features like increased bit depth, CMYK, etc., may have turned developers off. I'm merely guessing here, though. I definitely agree that GIMP has a lot of potential, and a few dedicated developers could really take it places.
- dkersten 16y ago
  I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche... ...use what they're used to; they're hostile to any change from the start. I don't know about the developers and why more people aren't interested in helping out (though I suspect for a lot of people its a mixture of the difficulties of getting established in a large codebase and the beurocracy involved in a large project), but from a user point-of-view I think GIMP has a few problems. I've used GIMP exclusively for many years (but I'm not a graphic designer, so my use of image editing software was never terribly heavy) and I used photoshop for the first time last summer. My transition to photoshop was a very pleasant one as, IMHO, photoshop has a much simpler and more productive interface (buttons are easy to access, convenient keyboard shortcuts, interface is not too cluttered); it has a larger range of (more advanced, generally) filters and tools; and it seems a lot faster to me too (definitely when applying filters to a large image. This can be, in my experience, quite slow in GIMP, but in photoshop most filters are almost instantaneus for me). I can only assume that many other people feel the same and I imagine this may make it less desirable for people to work on GIMP, especially if there is (perceived) resistance from the GIMP developer community for GIMP to move in the direction that newcomers feel it should (eg, does GIMP still have that horrible multi-window interface? Most people dislike it (though since I started using a tiling window manager on windows it actually becomes much more usable!)). Having said all that, from a user point of view, unless you make a reaosnable amount of money with your photo-editing, it is still hard to justify photoshops high price tag. GIMP being free is definitely a big plus point for it for casual use.
retube 16y ago
Another missing feature for me is lack of a CYMK color palette. Vital for sending images to the printers.
- wazoox 16y ago
  There's a plugin for that, not perfect but does the job.
  - jamesteow 16y ago
    The fact that you need to download a plugin for something as essential as that is a big drawback.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >Vital for sending images to the printers. Not entirely, I get away with it as the publications ultimately use low quality reproduction and so they don't match anyway. It's certainly better but the main issue for me sending RGB is brightness and I've learnt to adjust for it. The consumer doesn't know what it's supposed to look like colour-wise, they're probably reading in non-optimal conditions, possibly colour-blind. Given what gets put on the cover of professionally produced work (http://www.psdisasters.com/ http://www.psdisasters.com/) this almost seems the least thing to worry about (yes I'm exaggerating).
coffeeaddicted 16y ago
Having only 2 principal developers left which have little time sounds to me like the biggest problem. That's not enough manpower to compete with Photoshop in the long run. One reason for that might be that Gimp already does the stuff most coders need from an image manipulation tool, so maybe there's not enough itches to scratch left to get more talent interested in developing for it.
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rythie 16y ago
Surely the underlying problem is that GIMP is and has been underfunded for years. Where as Photoshop costs $100s, GIMP presumably has very little revenue if it can only pay for two developers. Firefox is able to develop quickly due to the deal with Google, maybe GIMP needs something like that, e.g. a app-store for plugins or a kickstarter funding drive.
jlouis 16y ago
Can you represent each channel as a double? Or will that take up too much memory in the long run?
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hackermom 16y ago
It's funny how the writer mentions a handful of technically unimportant flaws with GIMP, blowing them out of proportion, but fails to mention the one big thing where GIMP falls flat on its ass: the clunky, unstructured mess of a UI.
- mgedmin 16y ago
  That was footnote #1 in the article.
npaquin 16y ago
The problem that I've always had with GIMP is that it (menus, macros, general UI, etc.) doesn't mimic Photoshop. If you want to go after a well established product why not mimic these things to achieve a higher adoption rate (due to instant familiarity)?
cageface 16y ago
This article brings my experience with OSS full circle. It was the Gimp and GTK that first drew my attention to OSS in about 1997. At the time it was tempting to believe that OSS was inherently a better development model but after almost fifteen years it's clear that it's been wildly successful in some domains but a washout in others.
ominous_prime 16y ago
To everyone who is replying to the 8bit issue by mentioning GEGL - Have you actually used it in a professional capacity? As a (now part-time) professional photographer, I have evaluated GIMP; and as a FOSS advocate I really wanted it to work. The performance issues the article mentions are with reasonable sized images at only 8 bits, but editing a 16bit, 25MP image wasn't just slow, it was unusable. Photoshop however, runs in near real time at these image sizes. Even automating a GEGL filter to run on a series of a few hundred images would take long enough that I couldn't maintain a usable workflow.
NIL8 16y ago
What shocks me is the lack of competition in this field in the year 2011. Why are we still talking about choosing between GIMP or Photoshop? I know there are other programs out there that some people will claim they prefer over GIMP or PS, but for most of the planet it's GIMP or PS. Is the lack of competition due to the magnitude of such a programming endeavor or is it something else like patents? Any idea?
- samlevine 16y ago
  I've been using Pixelmator for a few months now (GIMP works great in Linux but I've found it's performance in OS X to be rather poor). It's still closed source software like PS (even if it does use open source libraries), but it's fast enough and gets the job done (my needs are really meager). The reason why GIMP doesn't have more developers is easy: Programmers don't have any itch to scratch at this point and there isn't currently a big market for prosumer image tools (most folks use PS one way or the other, paid or pirated). If Adobe managed to somehow magically make piracy of their software impossible I think it's likely that you'd see a number of free and non-free products in strong competition with Photoshop Elements.
  - NIL8 16y ago
    Interesting point about piracy. Without a need, there's no reason to innovate.
waterside81 16y ago
It's a shame that GIMP isn't supported by more devs/money. Writing script-fus for GIMP makes it so much more useful for a developer than Photoshop. I've saved myself so much time using python-fu with GIMP to automate opening, manipulating, saving of files.
bitwize 16y ago
The problem is that the intersection of fosstards and serious print designers is vanishingly small. If you're doing pro press work, you're going to buy the tool that everybody else uses and that print shops have standardized upon. That tool is Photoshop.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
For anyone serious about image production the cost of the software, like the cost of the camera and lenses is insignificant. For most photographers bit depth is only something they give much thought to when a client dictates (like a stock agency requiring a 16bit tiff, for example). For the vast majority of people just making images, 8 bit depth is perfectly fine. Most sensors in digital cameras are not anywhere near 16 bit anyway, more likely 12 or sometimes 14. The photoshopessentails links below will obviously illustrate a difference (but not one that is very striking considering the destructive editing applied) - its a classic dynamic range compress/expand to show the benefits of higher quantization levels. Obviously that will degrade an image. Nobody, I suspect, is willing to show a side by side comparison of an image showing ordinary editing with rounding errors that make the slightest different to the image. Most output is computer screens anyway where there is so much more impacting the image than rounding errors in editing stage. When you print an image that also introduces its own set of transforms, some have the benefit of making much that is visible on the screen (like moderate chroma noise) largely go away. I dislike GIMP because it lacks the polish and sophistication of Photoshop but good photographs are good photographs, regardless of rounding errors in adjustment layers. When you look back at the last century of images, how many of those photos do you say would be improved had they more resolution, or less banding or whatever technical nonsense metric you want to apply.
code_duck 16y ago
Yes, Gimp isn't competition to Photoshop for professionals. For people who want to do a variety of tasks where professional quality isn't critical, however, it's great. Gimp falls somewhere in between Photoshop Elements, PaintShopPro and Photoshop. The UI is a huge problem. Whomever thought it was a good idea to make the tool window always on top with no way to minimize it, and no menus, needs to step away from working on UIs.
city41 16y ago
GIMP has no support for the Pantone color system either. Another reason professionals tend to avoid it. Not the GIMP's fault, as Pantone is proprietary. But regardless, it's used heavily in the design industry.
pistacchio 16y ago
Gimp is one of the main reasons why I left Linux. After years of Windows I finally gave Linux a chance and immediately fell in love with it. Being a programmer it gave an incredible boost to my productivity and creativity. Having a proper shell, for example, or a real ssh client (not some half baked solution like putty). As I also work with media (graphics and music), I find the lack of any semi-professional software for producing music (nothing to be compared with Cubase, Ableton Live or even Fruity loops) nor programs to make graphics (Inkscape is not close to Illustrator and then Gimp...). So I had to constantly keep a virtual machine for those (read: running in a virtual machine the most resource expensive programs) or another partition for dual boot and I ended up having two PCs. I sold them both and bought a Mac where I can have Photoshop in a window and a terminal with a proper unix machine on the other.

201 points by rkwz 16y ago

I don't know much about photo editing, but I've used Gimp for a little while along with Inkscape for editing. I use it for simple stuff- drop shadows, minor logo work, etc. Is there a noticeable difference vs. photoshop on that level?

webuiarchitect 16y ago
Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!! Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.
- sgift 16y ago
  Are there any arguments why a non-commercial product (not necessarily Gimp) will never be able to reach "that level"? This looks suspiciously like "open source software is always worse than closed source!!!!!" which has been refuted more than once.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins. But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.
    - atesting 16y ago
      Have you ever tried MyPaint? IMO a good example of a software which does its tasks very well (I'm no (digital) painter, but I've heard about graphic artists seriously thinking about switching to it... if it only had a Mac version...).
- tintin 16y ago
  I agree Photoshop sets the expectations high. But I don't agree that a non-commercial product cannot reach that level. Take a look at Blender.
  - jkahn 16y ago
    That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
    - anthonyb 16y ago
      But it's been open source for 8 years and under active development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development There can't be a huge amount of the original source left, surely?
- jarek 16y ago
  Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".
david2777 16y ago
I think that for small stuff like that the difference won't be very noticeable,especially to the end user. If you get some designers to really look at it they might notice a difference, but I wouldn't want to pay for a Photoshop license for minor stuff like that.
- derefr 16y ago
  A more interesting question is, to me: is The GIMP an adequate replacement for Photoshop Elements? I believe they have the same target market—people who are "adding drop shadows, doing minor logo work, etc."
  - dagw 16y ago
    Purely feature wise they might might be comparable, but features isn't where PSE's strength lies. Photoshop Elements has done a lot of UI work to make common tasks really easy. Someone who has never done any photo editing before can probably sit down with PSE and quickly get pretty great results without any major problems. The same can definitely not be said about The Gimp.
furbearntrout 16y ago
Not really. The nice folks at Adobe would have you believe otherwise, but at low color depths, low image sizes, low skill levels; the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate. Unless you are making a lot of images, _and_ relying on them to make money, gimp is more than enough.
- _delirium 16y ago
  > the difference isn't worth 5$, much less (googles) 999$ (before 100$ rebate). I think Photoshop, like Windows, is a beneficiary of piracy in this respect: if there were no way to get Photoshop for less than $999, there would be a lot more people using alternatives for a lot of niches where Photoshop isn't absolutely necessary. But students, people starting out, small-time freelancers, and even some random home users editing their Christmas photos just pirate Photoshop. Although, Paint.NET is gaining some market share in the home-user category.
  - ZenzerNet 16y ago
    Photoshop Elements is reasonably priced at £58 on Amazon as of right now. The people you're talking about do not NEED the full $1000 package.
    - CrLf 16y ago
      They don't NEED it, but they WANT it.
  - true_religion 16y ago
    At my school students recieve Photoshop for free if they are in a class that requires it, and if not they can buy it at deeply reduced rates---about ~90-120 for CS4 if I last recall.
tintin 16y ago
In my opinion there is. In Photoshop you can attach dropshadows (layer styles) to layers. This will save you a lot of time when something changes. I used Photoshop and Gimp. I can create the same images in Gimp but it just takes a lot more time. For hobby that's ok, but for work it's not. Thats why people are willing to pay a lot for Photoshop. One thing that is bothering me in Gimp is that there is a layer size. Seems like a minor thing. But these are the little things that get in the way of working quick.

iwwr 16y ago

This is valuable feedback from an artist who actually bothered to try to use the software. Ultimately, for a highly-paid artist, learning a new interface is itself costly.

iwwr 16y ago
I don't quite understand the downvotes, anyone care to comment? I just meant that time is a valuable commodity which artists can rarely afford, unless they have a really good reason to. I applaud this reviewer for having the time.
- kprobst 16y ago
  I don't think his main problem is with the interface.

joakin 16y ago

I expected this to be a rant or flame, but in fact he has described wonderfully what needs to be said. Besides from all this pro features that GIMP lacks, in my opinion its biggest flaw its the UI. Its poor and raw, and makes sense if you are a programmer... Mainly this is what keeps it far from the regular users I know. Hope It doesnt die, its a very good open source multiplatform editing tool...

damncabbage 16y ago
I, hand on my heart, swear that, as a programmer, I don't think GIMP's UI makes a jot of sense. A week away from GIMP to mess with Photoshop had me converted after the first couple of days, sadly. Photoshop is both a blessing and a curse for OSS. (A blessing that it's a nice shiny target. A curse in that the target is half-way to the moon.)
- masklinn 16y ago
  There are numerous closer targets to shoot for, which are not photoshop but are still pretty darn nice (Acorn or Pixelmator for instance on OSX). OSX also has SeaShore, which I believe is built upon GIMP's tech but with a Cocoa frontend. It is fairly nice.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Wondering how hard would it be to build it on top of GNUStep. Anyone cares to try it?
  - eli 16y ago
    I bought Pixelmator years ago and it's great for what it is, but it's not really in the same class as Photoshop (or really even GIMP). The UI is clean and functional, but even as an occasional user I run into missing features. Seashore looks interesting.
- wisty 16y ago
  Usability is key for a lot of users. I don't care if my photo editor is good enough for a pro. Pros use Photoshop. A good, free, lightweight editor is what most people need for removing red-eye, putting daemon horns on their third grade teacher, and cropping out their ex. An open source editor will always be able to do high-end stuff, as long as it has some decent scripting capability. The rest of us just want something simple. Take Open Office. The reason I switched was the better equation editor, and the tab-complete. I like FireFox because of the tabs and extensions. There should be more focus on a minimal but usable product, and letting the extensions make up the feature gap.

billhasmail 16y ago

"Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the internal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL." http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html Clearly this artist was not a curious user.

froydnj 16y ago
I think you're illustrating the point of the author: such an option should be the default. The user shouldn't have to go looking for it.
krakensden 16y ago
GEGL is not fully baked yet, using it reduces stability and the operations you can perform. Reviewing the default, non-GEGL GIMP was the right decision.

samdk 16y ago

The 8-bit color limitation issue is well-known and has been for a long time. The solution is GEGL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL), which has been under development for a (very) long time now and is partially implemented in GIMP 2.6, the latest stable version. It is a problem, but it's important to put it into perspective: almost all monitors display 32-bit color (EDIT: or less) anyway, so if you're doing work targeted at a computer screen, it probably doesn't matter anyway. If you need to do work at color depths higher than 8 bits per pixel (that is, if you're doing serious print work) then yes, you need to be aware of these limitations. If you're almost everyone else it's probably not an issue. (I don't mean to imply that it's not a problem at all, but I think it's important to keep it in perspective.) For the people here asking whether GIMP is good enough for what you're doing: Ars Technica did an excellent review of GIMP 2.6 about a year ago (EDIT: 2 years, but it's still the same major version). It's long, but well-worth reading and will answer your questions. It's written from the perspective of a professional who uses Photoshop, but does an excellent job of remaining balanced. This quote summarizes the review (and also my opinion) pretty nicely, I think: I may seem to skew negative since I talk so much about what's missing, but it's hard to dwell on what a program does well and not sound like a fawning idiot. Most people who sit down to get image editing work done with GIMP will not be disappointed. There is a ton of room for advanced work here. It can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/01/gimp-2-6-review.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/01/gimp-2-6-... While I don't follow it closely enough to really discuss GIMP's current development status, development does seem to have slowed significantly (purely from a user's perspective) in recent years. This is a real shame, since I think that for the most part it's an excellent program and in general I much prefer to work in GIMP over Photoshop. For all of its many flaws, I think it's a fantastic piece of software.

w1ntermute 16y ago
> Ars Technica did an excellent review of GIMP 2.6 about a year ago. From the article, seems like it was 2 years ago: "Last updated January 13, 2009". Might seem like an insignificant detail, but 2 years is an eternity in OSS. Are you sure things haven't changed significantly since that review?

gsivil 16y ago

I would be curious to see similar posts for Octave and OpenOffice. I am really happy that they exist but "inadequate" would be a fair word to describe both. Comparing of course with Matlab and MS Office .

eru 16y ago
Yes, though you can also compare MS Office to something like TeX, and find that either option is inadequate, depending on where your focus lies.
AlexandrB 16y ago
I haven't used Octave, but I find that Python + PyLab is a great replacement for Matlab in many cases. It's certainly a subset of Matlab in terms of features, but the things it does do, it does really well.

njharman 16y ago

as far as gimps usefulness to profesionals the movie version fork cinepaint, is good enough for making Harry Potter and other movies I question authors knowledge of / authority to speak for artistic professionals.

tzs 16y ago
Uhm, Cinepaint is a point in favor of the author's conclusions about GIMP. One of the reasons for Cinepaint is to fix the color depth problem the author wrote about.

cookiecaper 16y ago

There are several good alternatives to GIMP depending on what you're doing. GIMP is probably the best for traditional photo editing, but there seems to be more programs oriented toward illustration. In particular, I like Krita. I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche generally isn't comprised of big fan of computers in the first place, so they are more like the Office crowd and just want to use what they're used to; they're hostile to any change from the start. I also think that the extremely long development cycle of GEGL, which was necessary for the most commonly requested features like increased bit depth, CMYK, etc., may have turned developers off. I'm merely guessing here, though. I definitely agree that GIMP has a lot of potential, and a few dedicated developers could really take it places.

dkersten 16y ago
I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche... ...use what they're used to; they're hostile to any change from the start. I don't know about the developers and why more people aren't interested in helping out (though I suspect for a lot of people its a mixture of the difficulties of getting established in a large codebase and the beurocracy involved in a large project), but from a user point-of-view I think GIMP has a few problems. I've used GIMP exclusively for many years (but I'm not a graphic designer, so my use of image editing software was never terribly heavy) and I used photoshop for the first time last summer. My transition to photoshop was a very pleasant one as, IMHO, photoshop has a much simpler and more productive interface (buttons are easy to access, convenient keyboard shortcuts, interface is not too cluttered); it has a larger range of (more advanced, generally) filters and tools; and it seems a lot faster to me too (definitely when applying filters to a large image. This can be, in my experience, quite slow in GIMP, but in photoshop most filters are almost instantaneus for me). I can only assume that many other people feel the same and I imagine this may make it less desirable for people to work on GIMP, especially if there is (perceived) resistance from the GIMP developer community for GIMP to move in the direction that newcomers feel it should (eg, does GIMP still have that horrible multi-window interface? Most people dislike it (though since I started using a tiling window manager on windows it actually becomes much more usable!)). Having said all that, from a user point of view, unless you make a reaosnable amount of money with your photo-editing, it is still hard to justify photoshops high price tag. GIMP being free is definitely a big plus point for it for casual use.

retube 16y ago

Another missing feature for me is lack of a CYMK color palette. Vital for sending images to the printers.

wazoox 16y ago
There's a plugin for that, not perfect but does the job.
- jamesteow 16y ago
  The fact that you need to download a plugin for something as essential as that is a big drawback.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>Vital for sending images to the printers. Not entirely, I get away with it as the publications ultimately use low quality reproduction and so they don't match anyway. It's certainly better but the main issue for me sending RGB is brightness and I've learnt to adjust for it. The consumer doesn't know what it's supposed to look like colour-wise, they're probably reading in non-optimal conditions, possibly colour-blind. Given what gets put on the cover of professionally produced work (http://www.psdisasters.com/ http://www.psdisasters.com/) this almost seems the least thing to worry about (yes I'm exaggerating).

coffeeaddicted 16y ago

Having only 2 principal developers left which have little time sounds to me like the biggest problem. That's not enough manpower to compete with Photoshop in the long run. One reason for that might be that Gimp already does the stuff most coders need from an image manipulation tool, so maybe there's not enough itches to scratch left to get more talent interested in developing for it.

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rythie 16y ago

Surely the underlying problem is that GIMP is and has been underfunded for years. Where as Photoshop costs $100s, GIMP presumably has very little revenue if it can only pay for two developers. Firefox is able to develop quickly due to the deal with Google, maybe GIMP needs something like that, e.g. a app-store for plugins or a kickstarter funding drive.

jlouis 16y ago

Can you represent each channel as a double? Or will that take up too much memory in the long run?

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hackermom 16y ago

It's funny how the writer mentions a handful of technically unimportant flaws with GIMP, blowing them out of proportion, but fails to mention the one big thing where GIMP falls flat on its ass: the clunky, unstructured mess of a UI.

mgedmin 16y ago
That was footnote #1 in the article.

npaquin 16y ago

The problem that I've always had with GIMP is that it (menus, macros, general UI, etc.) doesn't mimic Photoshop. If you want to go after a well established product why not mimic these things to achieve a higher adoption rate (due to instant familiarity)?

cageface 16y ago

This article brings my experience with OSS full circle. It was the Gimp and GTK that first drew my attention to OSS in about 1997. At the time it was tempting to believe that OSS was inherently a better development model but after almost fifteen years it's clear that it's been wildly successful in some domains but a washout in others.

ominous_prime 16y ago

To everyone who is replying to the 8bit issue by mentioning GEGL - Have you actually used it in a professional capacity? As a (now part-time) professional photographer, I have evaluated GIMP; and as a FOSS advocate I really wanted it to work. The performance issues the article mentions are with reasonable sized images at only 8 bits, but editing a 16bit, 25MP image wasn't just slow, it was unusable. Photoshop however, runs in near real time at these image sizes. Even automating a GEGL filter to run on a series of a few hundred images would take long enough that I couldn't maintain a usable workflow.

NIL8 16y ago

What shocks me is the lack of competition in this field in the year 2011. Why are we still talking about choosing between GIMP or Photoshop? I know there are other programs out there that some people will claim they prefer over GIMP or PS, but for most of the planet it's GIMP or PS. Is the lack of competition due to the magnitude of such a programming endeavor or is it something else like patents? Any idea?

samlevine 16y ago
I've been using Pixelmator for a few months now (GIMP works great in Linux but I've found it's performance in OS X to be rather poor). It's still closed source software like PS (even if it does use open source libraries), but it's fast enough and gets the job done (my needs are really meager). The reason why GIMP doesn't have more developers is easy: Programmers don't have any itch to scratch at this point and there isn't currently a big market for prosumer image tools (most folks use PS one way or the other, paid or pirated). If Adobe managed to somehow magically make piracy of their software impossible I think it's likely that you'd see a number of free and non-free products in strong competition with Photoshop Elements.
- NIL8 16y ago
  Interesting point about piracy. Without a need, there's no reason to innovate.

waterside81 16y ago

It's a shame that GIMP isn't supported by more devs/money. Writing script-fus for GIMP makes it so much more useful for a developer than Photoshop. I've saved myself so much time using python-fu with GIMP to automate opening, manipulating, saving of files.

bitwize 16y ago

The problem is that the intersection of fosstards and serious print designers is vanishingly small. If you're doing pro press work, you're going to buy the tool that everybody else uses and that print shops have standardized upon. That tool is Photoshop.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

For anyone serious about image production the cost of the software, like the cost of the camera and lenses is insignificant. For most photographers bit depth is only something they give much thought to when a client dictates (like a stock agency requiring a 16bit tiff, for example). For the vast majority of people just making images, 8 bit depth is perfectly fine. Most sensors in digital cameras are not anywhere near 16 bit anyway, more likely 12 or sometimes 14. The photoshopessentails links below will obviously illustrate a difference (but not one that is very striking considering the destructive editing applied) - its a classic dynamic range compress/expand to show the benefits of higher quantization levels. Obviously that will degrade an image. Nobody, I suspect, is willing to show a side by side comparison of an image showing ordinary editing with rounding errors that make the slightest different to the image. Most output is computer screens anyway where there is so much more impacting the image than rounding errors in editing stage. When you print an image that also introduces its own set of transforms, some have the benefit of making much that is visible on the screen (like moderate chroma noise) largely go away. I dislike GIMP because it lacks the polish and sophistication of Photoshop but good photographs are good photographs, regardless of rounding errors in adjustment layers. When you look back at the last century of images, how many of those photos do you say would be improved had they more resolution, or less banding or whatever technical nonsense metric you want to apply.

code_duck 16y ago

Yes, Gimp isn't competition to Photoshop for professionals. For people who want to do a variety of tasks where professional quality isn't critical, however, it's great. Gimp falls somewhere in between Photoshop Elements, PaintShopPro and Photoshop. The UI is a huge problem. Whomever thought it was a good idea to make the tool window always on top with no way to minimize it, and no menus, needs to step away from working on UIs.

city41 16y ago

GIMP has no support for the Pantone color system either. Another reason professionals tend to avoid it. Not the GIMP's fault, as Pantone is proprietary. But regardless, it's used heavily in the design industry.

pistacchio 16y ago

Gimp is one of the main reasons why I left Linux. After years of Windows I finally gave Linux a chance and immediately fell in love with it. Being a programmer it gave an incredible boost to my productivity and creativity. Having a proper shell, for example, or a real ssh client (not some half baked solution like putty). As I also work with media (graphics and music), I find the lack of any semi-professional software for producing music (nothing to be compared with Cubase, Ableton Live or even Fruity loops) nor programs to make graphics (Inkscape is not close to Illustrator and then Gimp...). So I had to constantly keep a virtual machine for those (read: running in a virtual machine the most resource expensive programs) or another partition for dual boot and I ended up having two PCs. I sold them both and bought a Mac where I can have Photoshop in a window and a terminal with a proper unix machine on the other.